Digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) is a standard for storing and transmitting medical images and information about the medical images and for exchanging image data between different medical image devices.
The DICOM standard uses an information model that has a hierarchy structure including classes such as patient, study, series, and image (instance). Due to the hierarchy structure, data included in a certain lower class has common information regarding a certain upper class. That is, the study, series, and image (instance) classes included in one patient class have common information regarding the patient class, and the series and image (instance) classes included in one study class have common information regarding the study class. Likewise, images (instances) included in one series class have common information regarding the series class.
The common information may be unnecessary duplicate information in image data processing procedures. For example, when pieces of image data according to the DICOM standard are compressed, respective pieces of the image data are recognized as being independent in a general compression process so that the duplicate information is repeatedly compressed. Thus, compression efficiency may decrease. Also, the duplicate information is repeatedly transmitted in an image data transmission operation. Thus transmission speed may decrease.
Therefore, it is necessary to increase efficiency of processing image data according to the DICOM standard.